Shanghai – First Impressions No.4 – Carl Crow Arrives, 1911

Strange Odors of Camphor Wood and Hot Peanut Oil – Carl Crow – 1911

Carl Crow arrived in Shanghai in 1911 and made the city his home for the next quarter of a century, working there as a journalist, newspaper proprietor, and groundbreaking adman. He also did stints as a hostage negotiator, emergency police sergeant, gentleman farmer, go-between for the American government, and propagandist. As his career progressed, so did the fortunes of Shanghai. The city transformed itself from a dull colonial backwater when Crow arrived, to the thriving and ruthless cosmopolitan metropolis of the 1930s when Crow wrote his pioneering book – “400 Million Customers” – that encouraged a flood of businesses into the China market in an intriguing foreshadowing of today’s boom. Among Crow’s exploits were attending the negotiations in Peking that led to the fall of the Qing Dynasty, getting a scoop on Japanese interference in China during the First World War, negotiating the release of a group of Western hostages from a mountain bandit lair, and being one of the first Westerners to journey up the Burma Road during the Second World War. He met most of the major figures of the time, including Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, the Soong sisters, and Mao’s second-in-command Zhou En-lai. During the Second World War, he worked for American intelligence alongside Owen Lattimore, coordinating US policies to support China against Japan. The story of this one exceptional man gives us a rich view of Shanghai and China during those tempestuous years.

West Meets East And Likes It

Most foreigners went to China for the first time prepared to be sorry for themselves and carried a fair amount of self-pity with them. They also took with them a normal amount of moral indignation which was often used up and seldom replenished. Many of them found plenty of use for self-pity in the first few weeks, or months of their arrival for they came face to face with life for the first time. At home we divide life into grooves and compartments which isolate us from our less fortunate fellow beings. They do not live on the same streets, therefore we seldom see them and are unconscious of their existence. This is not true in China. No matter where one lives he is surrounded by a sea of poverty and human misery. We seem to be engaged at home in a desperate effort to conceal the ugliness and the cruelties of life and so lack the mental background of the Chinese who for so many centuries have adjusted themselves to their surroundings instead of attempting isolation. Thus many foreigners who go to China come into intimate contact for the first time with poverty, filth and cruelty. During their lives at home they have only read about these things in the papers.

There is something terrifying about it and especially about the huge masses of humanity – because at first it is difficult to think of these strange-looking people as human beings like ourselves. I will never forget the first stroll I ever took in a Chinese city. It was the second day of my arrival in Shanghai and I started out alone to explore the place, wandering about on an aimless route. Soon I found myself on a crowded street with no English signs and no white faces -there was no one who even remotely resembled the people with whom I had lived from the time of my birth. It was a July day and many of the small tradesmen were sitting in front of their shops stripped to the waist, comfortably fanning their fat stomachs. Everywhere I looked there were people, people, people -strange people -all of whom seemed to be converging on me. The air was full of the strange odors of camphor wood and hot peanut oil.

Today, almost thirty years later, a whiff of either gives me a little pang of homesickness for China but on that July day the odors were strange and only added to my feeling of isolation. All about me were peculiar sounds of street cries and an undertone of conversations in words I did not understand. I was suddenly terrified and wondered if I knew my way back to the hotel (1). I never felt exactly that way again but have seen the terrified and worried looks of hundreds of visitors to whom I have from time to time shown the sights of some crowded Chinese city. Because I never knew exactly what it was that frightened me, I always tried to find out what terrified them but they were as vague as I about the cause. I presume it was nothing more than the nightmare terror of strange surroundings – a sudden realization of the fact that for the first time in their lives there were no familiar signposts about – nothing to reassure them that they were still living on mother earth.

Carl Crow, Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom, (Harper & Brothers, 1940, New York)

 

 

1) Crow stayed in the Palace Hotel on the Bund when he first arrived in July 1911.